Her address says suburbs, but her shoes scream "get me out of here."

It is a longstanding tradition here at Suburban Kamikaze to begin every Thursday with a confession.

Ok, so that's not true.

But now that we have, it could be a thing. And we are desperately in need of "a thing" here at Suburban Kamikaze, where the stuff of big-time blogging - cats, recipes, readers - is in very short supply.

We tried to establish a more disciplined theme and publication schedule once, but it was anarchy trying to corral all of the other themes and it also turned out that there was not as much interest in the stuff under my couch as I had anticipated.

But whatever, Internet. Now that I've got you hooked with a confession, you will be putty under my couch.

What is it that we love about a confession? I suppose it has something to do with the feeling of superiority it provides, the feeling that no matter how we have wasted our lives trying to reproduce stuff off the recipe cards inside the Martha Stewart magazine at the hair salon, somewhere out there, someone else has done something even worse.

This week it was me.

And I'm not just talking about pretending that Confession Thursday was a real thing. Because at this point, the gap between that being a complete fabrication and mostly fabrication is starting to close a little bit. Truth has a funny way of coming true like that.

But I didn't come here on Confession Thursday to write about truth. That would make no sense.

I came to write about a teeny, tiny not-truth:

I didn't make the chicken pot pie.

The chicken pot pie came to us almost exactly as it was when Mr. Kamikaze first cast his eyes upon it - only a lot colder, from a box inside a freezer in the aisle at Costco.

I didn't plan to lie about it. It's just that he looked so happy when he saw it. And he made a point of complimenting me on it. Asking me whether it was corn starch that made the sauce so thick? What was I supposed to say? I have no idea? What kind of an answer is that?

I know how discouraging it is to come home from work day after day to find that the girl and I have visited grocery and speciality stores across the Midwest, hand selecting entree after entree, filling every cabinet in the house with boxes and bags and unrecognizable, but expensive-looking containers of the kind of food he doesn't like.

Does an olive grow anywhere on the planet that has not been in our refrigerator? How many different kinds of bread can a counter hold before something that looks like bread to him will appear?

I know how hard it is for him, with his crazy, olives-don't-count-as-dinner dietary requirements. So I let him believe we had made him a chicken pot pie, out of, you know, caring and stuff, and whatever else goes into a chicken pot pie. Carrots, I think.

Once the misunderstanding was out there, there was no way to roll it back up. Not even with the rolling pin I might have dusted lightly with flour and left out on the counter.

Photo: The author oftenonce never prepares homemade chicken pot pies at home for the members of her family, so the fact that anyone would believe she had is really beyond the point at which she could be criticized for not correcting the record. Which, for the record, she just did. So.

The nice thing about a cliche is that you don't have to reach for it. It imposes itself into your thoughts uninvited, like a toddler in fuzzy yellow footy pajamas who crawls into your bed after a bad dream about a monkey and then falls asleep pink-cheeked and warm and so sweet you can't bear to carry her back to her own bed even though you know you should ... and well, my point is, where did the years go?

Also, it must be said: It seems like only yesterday.

I've been around this bend and down this road and I've crossed this bridge before. It's the best of all possible outcomes. But oh god, can it really be time to start picking out dorm rooms again? She's only 18. I'm not finished yet!

While it has been a while since she has recognized my expertise in anything, I know I have still have many so-called words of wisdom to pass on. Or at least words.

In fact, now that I think of all of my various areas of near-expertise, it would take decades to pass on even a fraction of it. There must be so many things left to teach her! If I just had more time!

But time, as they say - Oh christ! Have they said everything already?

She was up for anything. From eating worms, or cicadas, or just all of the croutons out of my salad, the girl had appetite. She was a climber, an adventurer, a girl who couldn't say no. She tested me constantly. She kept score. She had my number.And now she was going off to college. With my number. Also my passwords.

If there is anything we can say with absolute certainty about 2016, it is that procrastination has paid off.

Let this be a lesson to those of you who wrapped up your annual Christmas greetings in time to still have a pumpkin seed left of faith in humanity, a smidgen of hope left for the future or a kernel of expectation that things are going to be okay. They still might. But there is every reason to believe 2017 may be the kind of year where the best you can hope for is one or two good hair days.

This is where delusional thinking and a little long range perspective can really pay off. And by "pay off" we do not mean to suggest solvency. Solvency is still a ways off for those of us who encouraged our children to go to college just as the bottom was falling out of the word business.

But perspective came gift wrapped this year. That is not a metaphor. Trust me. A year of writing pharmaceutical tweets and task lists formatted into spread sheets for no apparent reason has left me with very little in the way of metaphors. Or literacy.

I mean it actually came gift wrapped, because it was an actual gift.

Mr. Kamikaze, with his instinctive gift for gift-giving, put a bunch of new camera lenses under the tree for me and I have to say, I am loving the long-range view, artistically and in every other way.

This image of a squirrel taking advantage of our Halloween decor at Christmas - which took me only a few hours and a half a bottle of snow-chilled pinot grigio to capture - has left me feeling far more artistic than is justified.

Greetings from the Kamikaze Family Reunion 2015, where we have taken over a beachfront hotel on the Florida Gulf Coast and stuffed it with children, all of whom are potty trained and growing like mildew on a pile of wet beach towels.

In other milestones, some of them are not even children any more - old enough to toss them the car keys and send them on an emergency grocery run for more red wine and breakfast cereal.

There are 25 or 26 of us here - we have not been able to agree on an exact number. Our mistake was in setting the little ones loose on the beach before attempting to count them.

The important thing is that we are all here and no one has lost their only pair of eyeglasses in the surf or left their wallet in a pile of sand on the beach at 2 a.m. and had to go back out searching for it at 3 a.m., or gotten into an argument with their siblings over things like Why do I have to Sleep on the Couch I Slept on the Couch Last Time You Did Not Yes I Did.

None of that is technically true, but when you are drinking red wine and listening to the surf roll in under a blue sky, surrounded by some of your favorite people, grievances have a way of losing their shape, like a sand castle built a little too close to the water. So yeah, our grievances are a pile of wet sand.

Except probably my big-sister-in-law is saying to herself, am I really expected to feed this horde of 25 or possibly even 26 people every single night just because I did all the grocery shopping and all of the food is in my room? That is probably a pretty well shaped castle right about now.

Meanwhile, the teenagers are beginning to stir. Soon they will wake, discover that they slept past the hotel breakfast buffet, again, and begin to assemble their own sand castle grievances. Why would they shut down a breakfast buffet at 9:30 a.m. ?Are they trying to ruin my life?

It's a good question, but I really don't want to revisit that sand castle. I am afraid that next week, after my tan has faded a bit and I am back to my soul-crushing job in the grownup sector, I will look back on that sand castle metaphor and start to squirm a little bit. Really? I will say to myself. Sand castle grievances? Why didn't you just write something about the moonlight on the waves while you were at it? I won't lie to you, there is every possibility.